SHORT VERSION:Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Unglück) is a stroke of genius! LONGER:A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is a short story about the suicide of a poor, sad and disillusioned Austrian woman who happened also to be Peter Handke’s mother. The book was written in 1972, shortly af...
There are books that are both beyond parody and beyond criticism, and this is one of them.In the case of parody, I considered writing one but realized that the results would look exactly like the book itself, which would serve little purpose other than to hold a mirror to it, when merely quoting ...
Son zamanlarda okuduğum en zorlayıcı ve zevksiz kitaplardan biri oldu. Kitabın uzun ve serbest bilinç akışı yöntemi ile yazılmış olmadı okunurluğu azaltıyor.Yazar kendi hayatından kesitleri gerçeklerle harmanlayarak, farklı şehirlerde geçen hayatını ve kitabını nasıl yazdığını anlatıyor.Serbest b...
The time is an unspecified modernity, the place possibly Europe. Absence follows four nameless people -- the old man, the woman, the soldier, and the gambler -- as they journey to a desolate wasteland beyond the limits of an unnamed city.
Provocative, romantic, and restlessly exploratory, Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. Slow Homecoming, originally published in the late 1970s, is central to his achievement and to the powerful influence he has exercised on other writers, chief among them W.G. Sebald. A novel of...
Kaspar, Peter Handke's first full-length dramahailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to Waiting for Godotis the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by ...
It is hard for me not to compare this book with the one I read, and put down, just before it: The Quest for Christa T.. Both are odd and dense and uneven, but I found this Handke novel much less uneven and more satisfyingly odd. Often magical. I don't know how to describe the joys of Handke's wri...
Andreas Loser teaches classical languages and is obsessed with thresholds. He is a contemplative intellectual, reclusive, emotionally distant from his family (from whom he is separated), hesitant to commit himself to relationships, and in the habit of examining his every move before he makes it. ...
This volume of Handke's plays includes two full-length and four shorter plays by the young Austrian playwright. The first of the full-length plays, The Ride Across Lake Constance, is one of Handke's best-known works. It deals directly with one of Handke's favorite themes: the realities of theater...
Strano questo La donna mancina. In prima istanza perché l’unico altro libro che avevo letto di Peter Handke era Le immagini perdute e già dalle dimensioni si differenziava non poco con questo volumetto di poche pagine. Nel tomo maggiore la prosa era ricca, e della trama mi sono rimaste solo poche...
Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung (1975) (translated into English under the title A Moment of True Feeling) is a relatively early entry in Handke's (b. 1942) oeuvre, but he already has much of his characteristic voice and strengths in this book. A minor functionary, Gregor (**), at the Austrian e...
The unlikely eventual existence of WG Sebald's four novels presupposes the writing of this book. But that's saying it all backwards, isn't it? The fact is Handke wrote first, and Sebald took what he started to its illogical conclusion with a magically sustained prose. Handke can be a bit dull and...
10.03.2013 Warum habe ich P. Handke so lange ein Schattendasein in meinem Leseleben zugewiesen? Schon der Beginn von "Versuch über die Müdigkeit" ist großartig. 17.03.2013 Versuch über die Müdigkeit gelesen und jetzt mitten im Versuch über die Jukebox. Ich darf als Leser dem Werden des Textes zus...
Something had to be done. What I was experiencing in my idleness cried out for that. I decided to take the plunge and write a long story. Was this really the only way I could accomplish something? I sent Valentin, my son, to my childless sister in her small town in Carinthia and prepared for my w...
And on my desk a flat, rounded stone found on the shore of Lake Constance, dark granite, traversed diagonally by a vein of chalky white, with a subtle, almost playful bend, deviating from the straight line at exactly the right moment and dividing the stone into two halves, while at the same time ...
and subtitled “Austria, a Studio Film.” Some television films based on stories by Arthur Schnitzler had given him the idea. The characters in these films had appeared only in bare interiors; the closest thing to the outside world was the inside of a hansom cab. Keuschnig started his article by sa...
At least that was how he interpreted the fact that no one except the foreman looked up from his coffee break when he appeared at the door of the construction shack, where the workers happened to be at that moment, and Bloch left the building site. Out on the street he raised his arm, but the car ...